Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2731 mails)

Re: [SLE] Why have swap

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 15:09, Rohit wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have 128 MB RAM and 128 MB swap right now. What if I double my RAM and
> disable swap altogether? What can go wrong for the same setup?

When you run out or physical RAM, the system will try and page some
things out. You can end up paging things out even if you are not running
many/large applications. Sometimes the system runs more efficiently with
some things you don't use swapped out and more RAM for disk cache.

My advise would be to up the physical RAM you have, and leave the 128MB
swap as is.

If you disable swap completely, you may end up with things getting
killed by the OOM killer in the kernel if it for some reason run out of
RAM.

Someone else may have an idea of when swap starts becoming a non-issue,
like at 16GB or 32GB of RAM.. :)